You’ve invested time and effort into making your app an awesome experience, and we want to help people find the great content you’ve created. App Indexing has already been helping people engage with your Android app after they’ve installed it — we now have 30 billion links within apps indexed.

Starting this week, people searching on Google can also discover your app if they haven’t installed it yet. If you’ve implemented App Indexing, when indexed content from your app is relevant to a search done on Google on Android devices, people may start to see app install buttons for your app in search results. Tapping these buttons will take them to the Google Play store where they can install your app, then continue straight on to the right content within it.

With the addition of these install links, we are starting to use App Indexing as a ranking signal for all users on Android, regardless of whether they have your app installed or not. We hope that Search will now help you acquire new users, as well as re-engage your existing ones.

On April 27th 1994, Nelson Mandela became President of South Africa in the country’s first democratic, post-Apartheid election. Known now as “Freedom Day,” that date has become a symbol of hope in South Africa and around the world. To commemorate this historic day, we’ve partnered with the Robben Island Museum and the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory to bring the story of this UNESCO World Heritage Site online for the world to explore. The Maps gallery and Cultural Institute online tour allow people everywhere to see the island where Nelson Mandela and many of South Africa’s freedom fighters were imprisoned during their quest for equality.

As a symbol of South Africa’s struggle for freedom, Robben Island has become a destination for people to connect with Mandela and other freedom fighters. Standing in Mandela’s 8 x 7 foot prison cell, it's hard to believe someone could spend 18 years here. Exploring the historical artifacts on the tour, you can also see photographs of his cell during the time of his imprisonment. You can imagine Mandela sitting at the cramped desk, surrounded by books and papers, working towards a future of freedom for all.

Robben Island was also where activist Robert Sobukwe was imprisoned, kept in solitary confinement for more than three years after taking a stand against the Pass Law, which required black citizens to carry an internal passport and severely limited their mobility. Exploring Sobukwe’s home on Robben Island, you can learn more about the man who didn’t let prison halt his attempts to make equality a reality. You can even view the pages of his notebook, which is still kept on his desk today.

In the new online exhibitions on the Cultural Institute platform, you can also listen to prisoners’ personal anecdotes about life at this infamous prison, including memories of where they were forced to work as well as how they studied and came together to create a unified vision for freedom in South Africa. You can see some personal items donated by former political prisoners, including a football trophy from the their FIFA-recognized league, hand-drawn table tennis awards, a treasured trumpet, and a duplicate master key fashioned by a prisoner from lead.

Once a symbol of the oppressive Apartheid regime, Robben Island is now a memorial and a reminder of the human spirit’s irrepressible search for freedom. We hope you’ll take a moment to step back in time to explore and be inspired by the island’s story of hope and humanity.

The Internet has come to play an important role in elections worldwide, including in Africa. From making it easier for voters to find information, to enabling exchanges of views, to increasing voters’ engagement with decision makers and vice-versa, the web has in many ways changed how African voters approach the polls. And this was evident in last week’s Presidential elections in Nigeria.

As the country prepares for the governorship polls holding on April 11, voters continue to search for information on candidates, parties and polling units. To help voters find the information they’re looking for, in January we launched the Nigeria Elections Hub, and we continue to update it with news, Google+ Hangouts, and videos.

We’ve also been working with a number of local organisations on initiatives aimed at encouraging Nigerian voters to take part in the process and enabling them to make informed democratic decisions. These include:

Pledge To Vote; a social, online-based platform that encourages Nigerians to take part in the electoral process.

Upgrading the mobile-based elections monitoring app ReVoDa, which allows voters to report events from polling units across Nigeria, making elections social. We hope that this tool will also be used for other countries.

Training over 150 editors and news journalists from Nigerian media organizations on the use of digital tools for reporting elections.

As the electoral process in Nigeria culminates with the governorship elections on the 11th of April, we hope that both government and citizens continue to make the best possible use of Internet technologies to sustain and enhance democracy in Nigeria.